After the sort of career I’ve had, ten years of freelance writing and twenty years in book publishing, most people become literary agents or start their own small publishing enterprise. Instead, I decided to become a thought partner for people who need a little extra help pushing words around the page or across the screen. Sophia Serve is the name of my writing and publishing service.

SophiaServe.com is a place for you to read and think about writing as an expression of your deeper “you.” And talk to other folks who share your passion. You’ll also find information here about the books I’ve written. Or co-written. Or wish I’d written.

October 21, 2013

The closer we get to Halloween, the more I find myself thinking about how this time of the Celtic year brings all our dimensional veils together. And of course, since I'm now in home hospice care, and have just finished co-authoring a book called The Divine Art of Dying, death is not "far away."

So many questions have burst into this busy brain of mine.
What is this broad appeal we seem to have with a TV show called Breaking Bad? What "demons" are Walt, Skyler,Jesse and all the others dealing with? It's clear that they all are and there are many. And how do these "demons" (however we define them today) manifest in all our lives? And does that help to explain why so many people, across the demographic spectrum, can't wait to watch this show?

The13th century wise-woman, Mechtild of Magdeburg, suggested this as a possible explanation: "We do not know how strong we are until we are attacked by the evil of this world."

But who decides what's "evil"? Churches have certainly tried. Movies and TV shows attempt it.
Our own psyches wrestle with these concepts.

Another question that all this "breaking bad" talk has surfaced for me is this: What's human and what's "superhuman?" Is superhuman just a phase we haven't fully accessed yet, but is part of our unfolding humanness?

Have you noticed the number of new TV shows now that push supernatural themes? I've been reading Deborah Harkness' first two books of her trilogy. The second is Shadow of LIght and it looks at how a present day human (Diana) can "spin time" and has many adventures with vampires and witches. Then I read Gothicka by Victoria Nelsen and began to put some of this into our "common wisdom" perspective. Some of this goes way back to Swedenborg. Then there was Bram Stoker's Slavic folklore, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Twilight Sagas by Stephanie Meyer, The Matrix Trilogy, Ann Rice, superhero comic books.

Something obviously strikes a common ground for us human/superhumans. Maybe it's what The Green Lantern says: "Anything I can imagine, I can create."Perhaps Breaking Bad is calling us to imagine goodness...instead of...

October 18, 2013

The Egyptian figure, Ma’at is famous for staving off chaos. She wears her feather, rather than sticking her head in the sand. Unlike her, far too many of us prefer to handle economic and cutural challenges by choosing to ignore truth, generosity, justice.

Early Egpyptians believed things happened in an orderly, cyclical fashion. With Thoth, Ma'at traced the daily movements of the sun. She had big work to do.
When her wings are outspread, she assumed the “I will protect you” mode.

I was watching for her feather for what seems like months. A feather that would let me know that the universe was created in a state of perfect balance…until a few people decided to upset that balance by tipping things out of a state of generosity and gratitude, which is Ma’at’s preferred mode, into one of selected preference and greed.
Her job, and the job of those who lead and govern was to maintain Cosmic Harmony. What a phrase that is.It's, well, it's cosmic. That's huge. And important. And harmony assumes we’re singing in tune.
Our chords make some sense of progression. What we see is tranquil and pleasing to the eye.

One of Mr. Webster’s favorite definitions is one we lost track of over the course of the government shut down. “An interweaving of different accounts into a single narrative." Agreeing on a single narrative about anything seemed to be about as far from our grasp as spotting an ostrich feather floating in Lake Champlain.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead cautions people to think about what will happen after death when they enter a Hall where their actions are weighed against Ma’at’s feather placed on a pair of tall scales. Their hearts will be weighed. Among other actions, they will be asked to confess: I have not done any harm. I have not caused pain. I have not caused tears. I have not caused suffering.

Not a bad list.

How can a feather be anything but generous? The next time a feather lands at your feet, take a closer look. Ma’at may not share her ostrich feather with you, but, who knows? Next spring she may decide to send you another.

October 17, 2013

The Egyptian figure, Ma’at is famous for staving off chaos. She wears her feather, rather than sticking her head in the sand. Unlike her, far too many of us prefer to handle economic and cutural challenges by choosing to ignore truth, generosity, justice.

Early Egpyptians believed things happened in an orderly, cyclical fashion. With Thoth, Ma'at traced the daily movements of the sun. She had big work to do.
When her wings are outspread, she assumed the “I will protect you” mode.

I was watching for her feather for what seems like months. A feather that would let me know that the universe was created in a state of perfect balance…until a few people decided to upset that balance by tipping things out of a state of generosity and gratitude, which is Ma’at’s preferred mode, into one of selected preference and greed.
Her job, and the job of those who lead and govern was to maintain Cosmic Harmony. What a phrase that is.It's, well, it's cosmic. That's huge. And important. And harmony assumes we’re singing in tune.
Our chords make some sense of progression. What we see is tranquil and pleasing to the eye.

One of Mr. Webster’s favorite definitions is one we lost track of over the course of the government shut down. “An interweaving of different accounts into a single narrative." Agreeing on a single narrative about anything seemed to be about as far from our grasp as spotting an ostrich feather floating in Lake Champlain.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead cautions people to think about what will happen after death when they enter a Hall where their actions are weighed against Ma’at’s feather placed on a pair of tall scales. Their hearts will be weighed. Among other actions, they will be asked to confess: I have not done any harm. I have not caused pain. I have not caused tears. I have not caused suffering.

Not a bad list.

How can a feather be anything but generous? The next time a feather lands at your feet, take a closer look. Ma’at may not share her ostrich feather with you, but, who knows? Next spring she may decide to send you another.

October 09, 2013

What an idea, I thought. I’ll paint twelve little canvases
and then (somehow) put them all together. So, like a stack of little white square plates, they sat around wondering what would be served on them. For the better part of a year, they collected dust, until the other day
when, like many things now, I said, “What better time than now to do this?”

So I came up with the idea of looking through some
“cloistered” columns out into my golden October Vermont landscape. By hanging
the twelve canvases fairly close together, they seemed to want to be another
“windowscape” out into the world, moving from the extraordinary (above) to the
very ordinary (below.)

Deer. Bear. Wild turkeys. Hawks. Eagles. What should appear, I
wondered. A moose lumbered through. And
then I remembered the white herons or egrets that landed on a nearby marsh…and
suddenly two appeared and “took me back” to Egypt where they were called bennu.
Creation birds. Sacred birds connected to Atum, Re and Osiris. Their
cry, according to Egyptian mythology, broke through the primeval silence and brought the world into being. Their name
meant to “shine, to rise in brilliance.” Like gold.

Or like Carl Sandburg's "Autumn Movement" which brought me to a deeper recognition of what I was seeing all around me.

“I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,not one lasts.”

Whenever you see gold spread and beaten onto parchment pages (or onto little canvases) it means that God's story has broken into our story.The field of cornflower yellow is torn full of holes and new and beautiful things are flying in as surely as the beautiful bennu birds. Shining. Rising in brilliance. Like our glorious October.

September 19, 2013

Yesterday I received an original essay from a woman I met years ago, but someone you might also enjoy "meeting." Lois Sekerak Hogan lives in West Newbury, MA and among other things, weaves art, poetry and her essays into wonderful ways of viewing life. You can e mail her and learn more of her upcomiing website (and coffee-table book) offerings. In this latest essay, she quotes the Vietnamese Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. It's worth sharing.

"The miracle is not to walk on water,

The miracle is to walk on green earth.

dwelling deeply in the present moment

and feeling truly alive."

Yesterday, our house painters propped their ladders up against nearly every window as they prepped the wood. Scrape. Scrape. Pound. Pound. I "escaped" to one of our many quieter flower gardens with my new kneeling pad and some sharp "easy to spot in the weeds" tools (I hate the ones with green handles that are forever getting lost--whoever thought that was a great color scheme? Well, come to think of it, marketers who hope to sell you another set very soon.)

With the sun on my shoulders, I knelt. The miracle is kneeling by flowers. Even by weeds. Even with scraping and pounding in the background.

Another miracle is having a son with time and far-sight enough to spot a "new" rock
close enough to the house with the potential of becoming something far more than a big rock. The upper rim is surrounded by ferns and now it has a buried hose and a chiseled channel. Gravity enables water to trickle down the steep opposing side into a small bamboo-fed pool.

The further miracle is having a friend deliver some moss and then to plant it, with great care, all around the pool's perimeter. Another miracle is having friends to come and sit on the bench with me and enjoy the gentle sounds of falling water.

The miracle is sensing it all, being able to kneel, having the time to sit, and to know that "I'm truly alive."